Blog of the Russian travel photographer with unique photographs of interesting places.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Platforms for photographers

When I decided I needed a professional looking photosite with my pictures, there was only one way to go. This was PhotoShelter of course. I mean I looked through dozens of other offers, as I always do before investing my money, but all of them had some major drawbacks — SmugMug, Zenfolio, Foliolink, LicenseStream — none of them was perfect. I mean PhotoShelter was not perfect either, but I made it my choice despite the highest price among all that I've just mentioned. I can't say I've been long with them, but my choice prooved to be right many times.

And the main reason why PhotoShelter is the best is pretty weird: it's functional and fast and easy-to-use and all that stuff, but most important, that it has a good reputation among professional photo editors, buyers and others. When they come to your site, yhey see it's PhotoShelter and they think "Hm, this guy is not just showing snapshots to his friends, he must be a serious guy". So the site shares it's reputaion with you, which is good for photographers. Though, the process is reciprocal, I mean photographers of PhotoShelter make a reputation to the whole site. And in fact common photographers use it because this is the platform used by world famous photographers like Chase Jarvis and Ami Vitale. I guess PhotoShelter should pay such photographers to use their platform as this is the best promo for the site and major advantage over other platforms.